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Oh god, no. It’s “New Age Week” over at Everything is Terrible, the collective that mines video kitsch to bring viewers the absolute worst (and best) of cultural detritus. This might actually be the most insane/offensive thing they’ve ever found. It comes from the cult/public access television producers Unarius Academy of Science. It features members acting out their “unscripted” past lives, which apparently includes more than enough blackface to get this iteration of Unarius’s practice banned from TV. [Everything is Terrible]

Due on Friday: Submissions to the 3D Additivist Cookbook. If your interests fall in line with speculative machines, disruptive 3D-print technology, or “The Weird,” watch the Additivist Manifesto—or read it—then send in your recipe, whatever form that may take. [Additivist Manifesto]

LaGuardia airport will be demolished and completely rebuilt. The new $4 billion design is a mashup of design concepts from SHoP Architects, Dattner Architects and Present Architecture, who all submitted proposals to replace the troubled airport last year. Construction is supposed to start sometime next year. [Dezeen]

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times Journalist famous for not only supporting the Iraq war but telling the Iraq people to “Suck. On. This.” has actually written an informative column about the Middle East conflict. This column is mercifully short on prescriptive advice and offers a very good history lesson of life since 1979, and the roots of extremism in the region. [The New York Times]

If you want to see the male gaze in action today, then by all means, check out this video of Kim Kardashian repping a new energy drink called Hype. It begins with Kim Kardashian dressed as Audrey Hepburn riding a bike. She’s all by herself, but somehow falls off (what a silly woman!) and finds herself possibly unconscious, dreaming about wearing a powdered-wig and floor-length gown. It’s once we get to this part, the gaze is in full force, showing a close-up of Kardashian’s bosom, then a head-to-toe shot, so that we can see all of her. From Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look.” [Vulture]

Real estate developers are suing the city of Oakland over new legislation that would construction projects to include one percent of their budgets for public art commissions. They claim it violates their 1st Amendment rights. Bay-Area artists are pissed. [KQED]

In a related story, Gabriel Metcalf argues that the Bay Area’s “progressive” policies are so anti-development that it has become nearly impossible to create new housing to meet the region’s needs. This is especially true of San Francisco, which is no longer a haven for the next generation of leftist thinkers and artists due to its rampant unaffordability. [City Lab]

In other art news from California, a tree fell down outside a children’s museum in Pasadena; eight children suffer injuries, including two who were critically injured. [Associated Press]

London’s National Gallery has had 50 days of staff walkouts so far this year. An all-out staff protest headed up by the Public and Commercial Services Union will begin on August 17. [Reuters]

The Horror of Party Beach, an example of a movie that artists like, according to Robert Smithson.

Hey, it’s Friday, but we can’t wait until Monday, to find out if Gawker will “reboot”; CEO Nick Denton says there’s “room for the possibility of changing the company name.” [Digiday via Daily Intelligencer]

Matisse makes an appearance on the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. [Art World Scenes]

This December, Miami will receive another satellite art fair. This one is actually called “Satellite.” [artnet News]

A quick commentary on the complexities of the term “net art” from Rhizome’s Michael Connor. [Rhizome]

A great report on the voluntary “fansubbers” in China. The voluntary market has grown because larger groups had been subject to government crackdowns on copyright infringement. [Motherboard]

An interview in which you can learn that artist Hans Haacke is involved with activist group Gulf Labor. [Hyperallergic]

Note to self: Never complain about the high prices of a lighting establishment because I could get punched in the head three times. [Courthouse News Service]

There are two dogs riding on a Vespa and the driver is Iron Man. This video only has 233 views! [YouTube]

Quick job for you? Find the e-mail address of this artist. [Mechanical Turk]

Your weekend read comes from 2010: “The Architecture of Serial Killers” will give you the best conversation starter (or killer) about what artists talk about when they hang out together. [Star Wars Modern]

Librarian Xiao Yuan has admitted to stealing over 140 paintings from the collection of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Yuan had been replacing the school’s collection of paintings with his own forgeries and selling the originals at auction—a scam that generated roughly $6 million. [ABC News]

Move over Qatari oil moguls! Are movie stars the new blue-chip collectors? Hollywood’s top ten collectors collectively own around $4 billion worth of art, about 16 percent of their combined net worth, according to research firm Wealth-X. The tastes of the rich and famous? Leonardo DiCaprio’s $10 million collection includes works by Takashi Murakami and Basquiat. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas might have made their respective fortunes from movies full of explosions, but they’ve spent them on boring-old Norman Rockwells. [CNBC]

Georg Baselitz has withdrawn artwork on loan to museums as part of a protest against Germany’s proposed restrictions on international art sales. Under the new legislation, the state could declare artworks over 50-years-old as national treasures and block their export to foreign buyers. This would be great for Germany’s museums, but bad news for gallerists and collectors looking to cash out. An eye-roll-inducing letter signed by 300 German dealers compared the proposed regulations to Nazis looting artwork from Jewish collectors. [The New York Times]

David Brooks writes about Dustin Yellin and Pioneer Works in his opinion column for the New York Times. This is a little off his regular beat, which is largely espousing Republican political viewpoints and occasionally talking about books. [The New York Times]

In case you missed “GIFs to Have Sex By,” you can now view them all on the Digital Sweat online gallery. [Digital Sweat]

In today’s robot news, exo-skeletons are now becoming a reality. Panasonic, for example, is just months away from marketing an exoskeleton that will help humans carry additional weight. Like a human ant. [MIT Technology Review]

The young-ish organization Triple Canopy, begun in 2007, has already found a home for its archives. NYU’s Fales and Special Collection Library will “use its computer storage to make room for the group’s files and will continue to add new issues as they roll in,” says ARTnews. So Triple Canopy is getting extra hard-drive space? [ARTnews]

Housing activists are protesting Mayor de Blasio’s upcoming appearance at the Vatican. De Blasio is set to appear with the Pope to discuss environmental issues and human rights. The group Metro Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) claims this would be an “embarrassment” to Pope Francis, as they hold the DeBlasio administration accountable for unacceptable conditions in the city’s deteriorating housing projects. [New York Daily News]

Rhizome has archived VVORK! This is significant not only because VVORK was a hallmark of its time (2006-2012), but also because Rhizome has solved the problem of archiving videos from third party websites. This is a huge problem for blogs that, say, embed YouTube videos in their daily posts. More on this soon. [Rhizome]

Human Rights Watch has released another damning report on labor conditions in Abu Dhabi. In the report, HRW places the blame not only at the feet of the UAE and its agencies, but the businesses this labor supports; New York University, The Louvre and The Guggenheim. [Hyperallergic]

Christian Viveros-Faune decides that MoMA’s contemporary painting survey “Forever Now” sucks. There are so many zingers in this review they are hard to count. A few: “Each of these artists’ works is the art-fair equivalent of collector catnip…Showroom-tested and market- approved, the artists in “Forever Now” don’t so much constitute an artistic style as embody so-called zombie formalism. (Critic Walter Robinson recently coined the term to describe faux-original painting that attempts to revive the “walking corpse” of Abstract Expressionism.)…Fronted by Hoptman’s abracadabra, MOMA has endorsed the 2015 painterly equivalent of Design Within Reach.” That’s just from the first page. [The Village Voice]

For what it’s worth, when I visited Abu Dhabi this year, my UAE tour guides refused to let anyone visit the construction site of the Louvre, because they claimed Western journalists would only focus on the labor conditions. These staff were convinced that journalists only found the worst, out of date cases and chose to make an example of them. When I visited a friend at NYU Abu Dhabi, and we discussed this, I was told that while the tone of some Western journalists could be off putting, the labor conditions were a real issue and most people in this person’s circles over paid any help they had to try to correct those problems. [Paddy Johnson]

Jon Stewart has announced that he’s leaving the Daily Show after seventeen years. [Wonkette]

A recap of the talk Paddy Johnson gave at YoungArts last week. [Miami New Times]

A long debate about the virtues of having a tiny tab on your zipper pull, a leftover from the industrial process which would save thousands of man hours and dollars, but remains because it’s aesthetically unpleasing. Instead, people work eight hour shifts to assemble perfect zippers. [Bunnies Studios, via Metafilter]

Police in the Netherlands have busted an “industrial-scale” weed operation because it was the only house on the block without snow on the roof. [Gawker]

Auction world insider Josh Baer, who runs a well-known up-to-the-minute art world newsletter, broke rumors about the highest-ever art sale, a Gauguin painting, on his February 3rd newsletter:

Has the record been broken for a private art sale for a single work of art?? If its true

that the Qataris have paid $300 million for Gaugin’s “Nafea Faaipoipo”, then the wags citing low oil prices as having a big effect might have….?

The New York Times forwarded the story with a mention to Baer Faxt, but the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow didn’t even give the attribution. Baer takes issue with WSJ editor Eben Shapiro and the general bad practice of ignoring the smaller outlets. [Baer Faxt newsletter 2/3/15 and 2/10/15, New York Times, Wall Street Journal]

The most popular comment on Gawker’s vine from space report is a theory about butt plugs. [Gawker]

Today’s Google doodle is designed by an 11 year old from New York. [BetaBeat]

Christie’s is offering up Vermeer’s 1655 “Saint Praxedis”, one of only two of his works in private hands. Vermeer made a total of 34 paintings in his lifetime. The piece is valued at £6-8 million, which compared to say, Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash” painting that went for $109 Million last year at Sotheby’s and well, you may end up scratching your head. [via: @kellycrow]

In case you missed this: A collector Q&A with the New Criterion’s James Panero. [Supreme Fiction]

A computer successfully convince 33 percent of the judges at the University of Reading that it was a 13 year old boy, thus passing the Turing Test. It was the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death. [Gawker]

Humans have spent more time watching Gangnum Style than they have writing all of Wikipedia. Is comparing apples to oranges? Dylan Matthews thinks so; we make things so people can spend more time enjoying and using these things. Matthews cites Stonehenge and The London Olympic Park as examples. [Vox]

Everyone on the social media tubes have been re-posting about some scientific research that says taking photos of art impairs your memory of it. Will telling Instawhores they’re going to suffer from the “photo-taking impairment effect” change their ways? Doubting it. [HuffPo]

Brooklynites are getting their way, kinda. The Brooklyn Flea, a summer-only craft fair—or as I prefer to call it, Etsy Live!—won’t be returning to Williamsburg this year after locals have complained that they never get to enjoy their parks during the summer, as it’s full of tents, booze, and crocheters. [The Brooklyn Paper]

The Rubells on how they started collecting contemporary Chinese art. Their efforts have resulted in the opening of 28 Chinese, a showing of their personal collection held at the Rubell Foundation’s galleries. [The New York Times]

Yesterday the Miami art fairs brought us a range of celebrity-filled events we did not attend. From Hans Ulrich-Obrist in conversation with Kanye West about art and design—“What did I paint when I was in school? Music.”—to Lady Gaga’s dinner gala, Kanye West performing with Vanessa Beecroft, and the opening of the Perez Art Museum, we cried for the 41 whales remain beached in the Everglades. [Miami Herald]

Hunting down celebrity events are easy with this massive guide from the Miami Herald. [Miami Herald]

Bill Clinton presidential doodles have been leaked by Guccifer, the same person who hacked George Bush’s paintings (and a lot of other high-security breaches, etc). With a little practice, these stationary drawings could be ready for The New Yorker. [Gawker]

Millionaire art dealer Charles Saatchi was not in fact checking wife Nigella Lawson’s nose for cocaine when he was gripping her throat in public. [HuffPo]

You probably can’t get to the top without stabbing everybody in the back– is what we conclude from this Gallerist exposé by the London art dealer Kenny Schachter. He details what happened when his beloved in-law died and entrusted him with an art collection, and the vulture-dealers who have been scheming ever since. “[T]hese people are not an easy lot to keep at bay,” he writes, “especially when the wolves (competitors and shareholders) are huffing and puffing and trying blow their house down.”[Gallerist]

“To make matters worse,” he writes, “I wrote this on BA Flight 207 non-stop London to Miami for Miami Basel, surrounded on all sides by some of the protagonists. At one point I had to obscure my computer screen.” Oh my god. [Gallerist]

The blue chip world isn’t all that bad. Now one lucky raffle participant will win a $1 million Picasso for the raffle ticket price of $100. The December It’s a fundraiser to rebuild the city of Tyre, Lebanon, after it’s been devastated by Lebanon Civil War. [Hyperallergic, 1picasso100euros.com]

New issue of Cura includes a poem by Paul Legault called “Mary Desti’s Ass” [Cura]

If you’d like to see something grisly this morning, check out Emanuele Satolli ‘s photos from inside a “krokadil” cookhouse in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The flesh-eating drug is easy to make and has effects like heroin, but it turns your skin dark and scaly like a crocadile’s. [TIME]

Is this a joke? The New Museum has announced that it now sells CRONUTS. [Facebook]

Ever feel like the net art community isn’t insular enough? Consider those woes cured with Net Artist Daily, an insider net art link blog with the tone of Gawker and the humor of the Onion. They’ve dubbed themselves The Huffington Post-Internet, a fitting title because like the writers at the Huffington Post, net artists never get paid.

Holland Cotter has identified a new trend in art: historical awareness. He reviews the the Prada Foundation’s remounting of the 1969 show, “When Attitudes Become Form,” and learns a little about the construction of myth. Great piece. [The New York Times]

The Russian art magazine Art Chronika will cease publication. This is yet another hit to the already small Moscow art scene, which has been hemorrhaging commercial art galleries over the last year. [Gallerist NY]

New York Supreme Court ruled artist Arne Svenson was in his rights to photograph his neighbors without their permission. Yay for the First Amendment and all, but these photos still sound creepy. [The Art Newspaper]

Physicists are fiercely debating whether a person would be crushed by gravity or flash-fried by a firewall of energy if caught in a black hole. The stakes? Oh, just the veracity of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This article is a little difficult to follow without some background in physics. [The New York Times]

Hyperallergic’s Mostafa Heddaya has a great piece on how Detroit’s defaults actually affect the Detroit Institute of Art’s “assets”. [Hyperallergic]

Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers tears Bryan Goldberg apart for introducing Bustle.com as the first publication that targets women or goes beyond the narrow scope of women’s magazines. He also defended himself from backlash by speculating that his critics are probably mad at him because he’s a man addressing a market for women. Face-palm. [Flavorwire]